


The Junkie's Sex Aliens

by Allegory



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Illustrated, M/M, SHEITH - Freeform, Shiro x Keith - Freeform, brooding keith, help me work the coding rip, i.e. hell, yall this gonna have picture mkay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 03:45:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11820546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allegory/pseuds/Allegory
Summary: Keith is the local bad boy in Northwood High. He’s tough as nails and seems to despise everything and everyone around him. Between failing grades and missing parents, there are very few things that still keep him in school. Keith dreams of freedom, of living on his own in the woodlands away from society.Shirogane Takashi is the transfer student who’s come all the way from Japan. On his first day in Keith’s class, Ms. Allura hands out a pop quiz that everyone flunks. Shiro completes it with only a single wrong answer. He speaks fluent English, has guns the size of military tanks and can be seen jogging around campus at the ass-crack of dawn. Keith hates him at first sight.Then there’s an alien sighting, a crater in the woods, and from then on their lives are inexplicably intertwined.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://ghostk-art.tumblr.com/post/164286291724/hey-there-were-in-ms-alluras-class-right-i  
> for the 2nd chap  
> need help tho the thing won't go in my writing :/

Brown-black branches lean into the force of the wind. Keith stands in the center of the woodland, a tornado of leaves picking up around him, rustling like crumpled paper across an empty hallway. He puts a cigarette between his lips, letting it settle there as he turns up and gazes at the sky. Between dark green interstices is a dull gray sky, heavy, burdened with rain.

Keith takes a lighter out of his back pocket. He leans back on his heels and rolls the flint wheel of the lighter, sparking a bright flame. It graduates, blue-to-yellow-to-orange like it can’t quite make out what it wants to be. Keith holds it against the butt of his cigarette but doesn’t inhale. He slides the cigarette up and down the flame, staring cross-eyed at the fuel as his fingers get warmer from the metal flint.

Keith starts counting. He starts from fifteen because fifteen was his age when his father disappeared, fifteen was the percentage he got on his latest physics test, fifteen was the number of days he’d been thinking about vanishing from the world for good.

_Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen._

He closes his eyes as he recites each number in his heart like a prayer. As the digits fall, he occasionally peers at the sky, hopeful for even a droplet of water. 

_Ten, nine, eight._

He remembers his father’s face and the companionable silence they’d shared in his youth. Nights at the apartment couch shuttled together, sharing from a bowl of dusty, expired popcorn. The packets labelled with pictures of rotten lungs, deformed babies, his permanently missing ashtray. The two of them in the summer, carrying tin buckets outside the house and sitting there by the back door, waiting for the rain that would never come.

_Five, four, three, two…_

The rain isn’t coming. Keith returns the cigarette into its packet where it joins the rest of its friends, a complete set of them. He stows the lighter away and pretends he’s smoking the air instead. He takes a deep breath in through his mouth.

And then the ground shakes, throwing him off his feet. It knocks the air out of his lungs. He barely breaks the fall as he lands backwards on his elbows.

It takes a moment before his brain can orientate the axis of the world. He cups the right side of his head, groaning. A mad hallucination of rainbow lights spark in his vision and Keith figures it’s been too many nights of staring at Nyan Cat flash on his screen, chugging red bull and black coffee, betting Lance that he can outdo him. A moment passes as Keith picks himself up, blinking the headache away. He stares at the horizon and realizes that it’s not a hallucination. Far beyond the thicket of stringent tall trees, a dot of light continues to shift in hue. The real Nyan Cat has come to abduct him.

Thank the fucking Gods.

Keith practically runs towards Nyan Cat. He was right all along: Nyan Cat _is_ Northwood’s porn star slash alien. He can’t wait to be stuck in a vortex performing shoulder shrugs whilst blinking as a 2D pixelated character in the corner of a website. No more waiting for the rain that doesn’t come, the cigarette that’s never lit.

But the light begins to fade. Like everything in Keith’s life, he finds that the closer he gets to the light, the keener it is to disappear. He chases it the way he chased his father when he walked out the door.

_You’ll come back tonight?_

_No._ _But someday._

But someday? Someday what? Someday Keith will understand that he can live without that man? Someday Keith will move on from the only person who’d ever remotely cared about him? Keith is sprinting now, one foot in front of the other like his life depends on it. He gasps in huge breaths of air, his feet burning against the crunch of twigs and foliage.

There is no Nyan Cat. Just a crater in the ground, about fifty inches deep and the same width. Enough space to bury a very short person. Keith gets the urge to wank right then and there at the thought. He decides he needs to smoke some weed, but instead takes out his phone and snaps a picture. He starts typing furiously.

**Keith: Guys, look what I found.**

He sends the image along with the text. Within a minute, he gets a response.

**Pidge: You get in there or it’s fake.**

Keith stretches his arm out and flips his middle finger in front of the camera, the crater in the backdrop. His gloved hand is enough indication that he’s not bullshitting with some Google search.

**Pidge: Where are you?**

**Keith: Woods. The ground shook and something must’ve flown down from the sky, I guess.**

**Pidge: “Woods”. Can’t you be any more specific?**

**Keith: No.**

That’s the end of it. Keith puts his phone away and it continues to vibrate, possibly because Hunk and Lance have taken notice. He sits on the edge of the crater and dangles his legs, thinking about that newspaper clipping from last week. An alien sighting down at Gamma R. Supermarket: according to a junkie who’d been out dumpster diving, a couple had reportedly been abducted by aliens. Though the junkie’s testimony might be under scrutiny, the couple really had gone missing. The only thing left of them was a shopping cart filled with rolls of toilet paper and a split banana peel. Northwood’s track record of students who pursue STEM careers make the news a hard one to swallow. Even the reporters seemed reluctant.

The porn star bit came from the fact that the junkie had said, quote unquote: _The aliens were built like bananas, but with penises for heads. Get that? Also, one of them had a cactus sticking out of its ass._

Keith just sits there staring at the dark pit of the crater. Shadows looms over him and he thinks that it might finally rain, but it doesn’t. He gets the urge to pee into the crater like some rabid wolf would mark its territory. Somehow, he manages not to follow through.

* * *

 

“The world is descending into chaos.”

“It’s been in chaos since the big bang. In fact, it probably is the chaos.”

Keith likes to sound smart around Pidge even though he doesn’t like the fact. He stands by her window now, staring out at the starless sky and the small houses nestled in the cul-de-sac. He’s thinking about the rain and why the world always plays a bunch of tricks on him, luring him into traps he’s willing to fall into only to vanish when he’s almost there.

Pidge doesn’t need him to sound smart to know he is, though. Maybe not the kind of smart that’ll get him anywhere in life but a unique brand, the sort they don’t teach you in school. She pins the picture of the crater on her corkboard, chewing a thread between her teeth. She winds the end of the thread around the pin and ties the other end to the badly-drawn silhouette of a banana-penis done on MS Paint with a mouse. Keith had the honors of putting a big fat question mark in the center of their alien.

“So where’ve you been?”

Pidge means where he’s been the last two weeks, absent in all his classes at Northwood High. It was only a couple months before their final year exam and Keith had vanished like a ghost, returning only upon the inception of the mysterious sex alien. He hadn’t been in his apartment when Pidge went over to check on him. She’d spent nights chewing her nails off, though she’d never give Keith the pleasure of knowing.

“Away.”

“No shit.”

Keith turns around and walks through the labyrinth of scientific papers and journals and articles scattered and stacked across the wooden floorboard. The Holt estate is an odd amalgam of homely cabins and sci-fi amenities: primarily built from logs, it has black, solar-powered ceiling fans designed to look ordinary, a bed that makes itself in the morning via a system of springs and gears upon the ringing of the alarm and televisions that have been rewired to run on hydraulic pressure to accommodate family experiments. Even the plants by the window’s ledge seem to follow Keith’s fingers when he waves them over. Keith is convinced that Pidge is training those plants to eat people, though Pidge vehemently denies it.

A rectangular drone with a piece of paper taped on it whizzes above Keith’s head as it flies towards Pidge. It nestles in her arms and bleeps softly. Pidge listens in as if they share some secret Morse code.

“Crap. Lance is in trouble with Mr. Spooner.”

Keith checks his phone. True enough, Lance is yelling over the chat group in all caps, not holds barred. He looks at Pidge as she extends her arms and the drone leaves out the window once again. Keith catches sight of the picture on the attached paper: a wobbly elementary school butt, the kind that bullies draw on your textbooks. It's done with a red sharpie and the person responsible had probably been blindfolded while doing it. 

“You have a phone,” Keith says, scanning over the texts.

Pidge takes out her phone. “Yeah, but drones are fun.”

Briefly, Keith wonders which sad sucker is going to be the next victim of Pidge’s spy. He slaps a mosquito that had landed on his arm and checks to see blood and dead insect bits smeared between his fingers. For all the bites beginning to pockmark his skin, wracking him with itches, a rush of euphoria floods him, leaving him with hopes that another mosquito will try to nick him. Keith wipes his palm over his jeans.

“Why don’t you do something to get rid of these mosquitoes instead?”

Pidge strolls off to her closet. She pulls a sweater over her shirt and gives herself a cursory glance at the mirror, fluffing her short hair just a bit. “Because they only ever bug you. What are you, blood type A or something?”

“Blood-cist…”

Keith holds the door open for Pidge. Or at least he would have, if the door hadn’t opened by itself via the control system on her desk.

“Actually, there’s a possibility that mosquitoes might actually be blood-cists. You won’t know until you design an experiment to investigate a causal relationship. Of course that would mean you’d need a large sample size and there are factors like ethnicity and…”

“Is that your AP psychology project I’m hearing?” Pidge’s dad, Samuel Holt, calls over from the kitchen. He shuffled out dressed in a pink apron and bunny slippers to see the two teens bounding down the stairs two at a time.

“It’s more on biology,” Pidge responds. “But no, it’s not a project and it won’t be one. I don’t have the funding or the credentials to pursue it, which brings me back to the beauty of physics experiments-“

“Shut up Pidge, I got fifteen fucking marks on that quantum test and you know it.” Keith bites his words back too late, but Samuel only waves his frying pan and tuts at him. If Pidge’s mom had been in, it would be a totally different story.

“We’re heading out,” Pidge declares at the front door, slipping her feet into clunky sandals with palm tree prints, a novelty souvenir from a family vacation at Santa Monica.

“Back before ten,” Samuel warned, though it wasn’t going to make a difference. Pidge had turned fifteen a few months ago and was already acting every bit like his brother; rule-breaker, parent-worrier and a chronic insomniac with a penchant for running around town in the middle of the night in her sandals and a rucksack containing various inventions. All these traits didn’t exactly help with being popular in high school, but they certainly made her the perfect alien-hunting buddy. Keith wouldn’t have asked for anyone else.

The two of them get into Keith’s truck and he sticks the key in the ignition, turning it twice, thrice before the truck gets a hint and wakes up. He climbs the speedometer, every bit the bad influence that Pidge’s parents had warned her about as a child. But like the rest of the Holts, Pidge was sensible. She knew when she was pushing her privileges, when to obey the rules; to call her parents two hours before heading out for a party or crashing at a friend’s place, to leave a note at the desk about her midnight runs and when to call her if she hadn’t returned home by breakfast. Pidge trusts Keith with her life on the road too.

“Think Lance is done for good?” Pidge asks while scrolling through the group chat history.

There aren’t many cars in the suburbs of the Holt residence. Keith speeds up, satiating the part of him that’d hoped to kill another blood sucker. “Knowing Lance? He’s probably blowing up the whole thing on chat.”

“True,” Pidge replies, though Mr. Spooner could hold one hell of a grudge. They’re right: never trust a man who looks like Santa Claus. Especially not one who drives a Mini Cooper he can barely get into with a back license plate boasting the word “REINDEER” on it. He never gets in trouble because his brother is the head officer of the police department in Northwood. Small town, small connections, big rights.

Pidge turns up the half-broken radio as Keith exceeds the speed limit and drives faster at the bends. It alternates between emitting hard metal and static, which almost makes it sound like some EDM concert gone wrong. Pidge had offered to repair the radio like she’d offered to repair the rest of the truck (springs are unravelling in the backseat, the engines rattle as if the truck is always too cold and Keith needs to time when he pulls the gears when he wants to reverse). There’s a lavender air freshener dangling from the front mirror, clicking against a black dice with seven dots on every face but it’s long dried up. The truck always smells like a woodland instead.

“You all right?” Pidge yells over the radio, just when Keith is thinking about how much he appreciates the terrible music. He slows down when he turns a junction into the main road.

“I’m fine,” he yells back. Pidge leans forward and turns down the volume. She looks at him and he doesn’t look back, staring instead at the car lights of the Mercedes in front of him.

“I was worried.”

“I know.”

Keith drums his fingers on the steering wheel. He gazes out at the woods that seem to stretch on forever on his left side, the woods that seem to flank every face of town. “I needed to get away from things.  From life.”

But Keith is slipping. He’s losing his grip on reality, and with each day that passes it all feels more and more final. School is ending, his friends are graduating, going off into different colleges in different states; Northwood only has one college and it’s barely any bigger than the public high schools. It doesn’t matter for Keith, though. At this rate he’s going to have to repeat a year.

“Could’ve answered my texts,” Pidge mumbles, crossing her arms. Keith remembers sitting by a tree trunk staring at the fifty-five texts, sixty-eight phone calls, hating himself for his inability to just slide the damn lock screen.

“Yeah.”

Pidge doesn’t push it but they both know the takeaway of the conversation.

Keith parks in the driveway to the Firefly Butthole. Hunk had coined the term one day when all four of them were awake after midnight and they decided to gather at Lance’s house. Matt Holt had come along for the cryptid hunting that Pidge promised him and he wasn’t very amused when he found out that the only thing to hunt in the tiny neglected garden the McCain residence boasted were fireflies, nestled around the thick bog that Lance swears, to this day, had been a measly pot of water. It had actually been _I’m not getting any closer to those fireflies, butthole!_ when Hunk addressed Lance. The name stuck.

This place is nothing like the Holt home. It’s country through and through. When Keith and Pidge make their way up to front porch, the door unlatches and releases a torrent of children, toddlers with buck teeth and baby Johan crawling out with a pacifier between her lips after them. The flurry of noise and conversation within the house becomes clearer- it’s something about missing bras and plastic knives. People are yelling over the tabletop as dinner is served by the one and only Mrs. Galliger, the iron woman of the house with a face frozen in time and a demon’s grip around a rusty old pan she uses to whack anyone who gets out of line.

“Dudes!” It’s an unfamiliar face that greets them at the doorway. He’s tall and shaped like someone used to carrying tires from one side of the state to the other, not the ones who work on specific muscle groups to participate in their commercials. There’s a hairy mole on his upper lip that catches Keith’s attention. “You’re here to see Lancy right?”

“Yeah,” Pidge replies, unsure what to do with the toddler clambering up her left leg. Hairy Mole kneels down and gently pries the toddler’s small hands off her. He swings her in the air and throws her over his back like a sack of potatoes. She gurgles happily.

“Come on in, then.”

Among the various cousins, nephews and nieces who seem to arrive one day and pack up the next, there are only a few faces that Keith recognizes to be permanent residents of the McCain household. Some of them wave at him while others seem to have forgotten or just find the matter of the fruit fly in their stew to be more important than the visitors. Annoying thoughts buzz in the back of Keith’s head: the same jealousy he’s always felt for Lance and his big, big world. Up the rickety stairs, Keith glances out a dusty window at the thick bushes and weed surrounding the pond, so dark and grimy that everyone agrees it looks more like a bog. According to Lance, there hasn’t been any fireflies since that one time they all came over.

“Ouch!”

“Quit kicking me.”

“Then stop doing that.”

Keith turns the doorknob without knocking or warning them of their arrival. Lance’s room is neat compared to Pidge’s, the walls painted a solid, baby blue. Books are placed on his desk where they belong, next to facial masks, lip gloss and eyeshadows extensively collected and meticulously arranged from most to least valuable. The door to the toilet is open and the cabinet above his sink boasts his more frequently used make-up kit. There’s a yellow cardinal perched within a graceful white cage. It hangs from his old-fashioned clothing rack, a gift from his mam as a kid.

Lance is splayed out on his bed with Hunk sitting on a stool next to him, painting a thin layer of Galactic Glow nail polish on his toes. Twin cucumbers conceal Lance’s eyes and his arms are folded across his midriff. He looks exactly like he usually does except Keith knows he’s probably fuming under the mud mask. He can tell from the lock in Lance’s jaw, his furrowed eyebrows.

“So is Mr. Spooner for real?” Pidge asks, sitting backwards on Lance’s mobile chair. She rests her arms on it and props her chin atop the heel of her hand, swinging slightly from side to side.

“Hunk, do you have any idea how to use nail polish?”

Hunk retracts, screwing the cap of the nail polish and tossing it onto Lance’s face. It rolls onto the soft, plump bed. “No, evidently.”

Lance grumbles but doesn’t complain any further. It’s a sure sign that he’s not in a good mood.

“I’m out of the Blue Lions for good. Mr. Spooner practically chased me off court.”

Pidge rolled over to Hunk on the chair. She pats him on the back, though it’s not like Hunk stays angry for long. Especially not when Lance is involved.

“Ice lemon tea?”

“Sounds great,” Pidge says. And when Hunk’s left the room, looking a little sulky, she turns her attention to Lance. “Didn’t this happen before? And he took you back, didn’t he?”

Lance sits up, the cucumbers falling off his face. He’s twiddling his thumbs. “It’s not the same. His entire face was blowing up when he yelled at me. I’m so screwed.”

They all know how much Lance needs that sport scholarship. The only thing he’s actually good at is baseball, and even though he doesn’t have any fanciful dreams about becoming some superstar representing America on the big stage, he does hope to get a college education and not have to go to a trade school like most of his relatives. Between the eight McCain siblings and distant family members popping up like wildflowers every week, the water and electric bills run way too high for him to imagine the burden of funding college.

“Just apologize,” Keith says. “Like, grovel, or something. It’s better than wallowing.”

Keith isn’t sure about the fact from the fiction, but from what he can gather Lance had gotten in a fist fight with Mr. Spooner’s son. Anyone who’s even remotely invested in Northwood’s baseball scene knows that he can’t play baseball for shit, but Mr. Spooner puts him on the team anyway because, well, Santa Claus privileges. Lance had gotten sick of that kid missing his shots. One comment came after another and the two started shoving each other, which explains the black bruise peeking out of Lance’s off-shoulder shirt.

“Keith’s right,” Pidge says. Lance’s cardinal, Kiwi (not to be confused with the bird Kiwi, which is his mom’s pet that lives in a cage outside the house), chirps in assent. “The faster you grovel, the more likely he’ll believe you’re sorry.”

“I’m not though,” Lance grumbles. Keith rolls his eyes and strides towards the bird cage, bending his knees to admire how well-kept Kiwi is. For a person who can barely take care of himself, Kiwi has a great owner. Her food bowl is always full of fresh nuts and fruits while Lance lives on McDonald’s special deals, and his food goals seem to be to alternate between Pepsi and Cola every day. The rest of the money he makes working part-time at the fries station at McDonald’s goes into beauty products, baseball shoes and topping up his cellular data.

Hunk enters the room then, carrying four glasses on a plate with the skills of a practiced kitchen hand. He distributes the iced tea and Lance mumbles an apology when Hunk hands him his. Hunk offers him a weary smile, one which Lance returns in kind. They knock their glasses together and that’s all it takes to mend their friendship.

Keith stares at the cubes of ice bobbing in the swirly brown liquid. He prods the glass against Kiwi’s cage, prompting her to take a sip. Kiwi stares at him with her beady eyes then hops away to the other side of the cage.

Pidge holds her glass up to the lamp hanging from the ceiling, a cue for her three best pals to follow. The light flickers and darkness descends upon the room. The noise downstairs escalate. There’s a loud thump against the wall of Lance’s room and what sounds like someone crashing through the second floor.

Keith can see the look of horror on Lance’s face through the light of the lamppost, shining in from the window outside. Hunk stifles a chuckle and before they know it they’re all bursting out in laughter. They gather around Pidge and smash their glasses together, so hard that most of the tea spills over their hair- Pidge, being the shortest of all of them, takes the brunt of it. She ends up looking like a soggy kitten when Lance’s da comes up and offers them a wax candle stuck on a can of beans. Her sneeze sounds like hardcore dubstep, which ultimately inspires Lance to get on YouTube and play some really bad five-hours-of-dubstep. Hunk offers up his data immediately, Lance’s financial situation unspoken between them, and when it’s not loud enough they end up smashed together in the McCain family van with Hunk’s phone plugged into the stereo system via the aux cord. Together the four of them make really bad attempts at organic dubstep, high off ice lemon tea and electric shortage, and Keith thinks he wouldn’t want it any other way.

 


	2. Chapter 2

In class the next morning, Keith is staring at the crater on his phone screen. It’s still dark out. The security guards hadn’t even come around when Keith parked his truck in the lot of the Gamma R supermarket (not the one where the alien sighting took place) next to Northwood High. He’d climbed over the back gates, standing at the top of the rails with his arms wide open, willing the wind to toss him this way or that to help him decide if he wants to attend school today. In the end he’d gotten off on his own volition.

The problem is that he’s still in his pajamas. An old, stretchy off-white shirt and shorts barely a third way down his thighs, shorter than his boxers. He hasn’t brushed his teeth and his chest is tingling, eyes bloodshot from shots upon shots of pure black coffee. The kettle and coffee machine are the last pieces of kitchen equipment that he hasn’t sold off to pay for rent. So his diet is composed primarily of instant noodles, coffee and the cigarettes he never inhales. He considers it a step-up from McDonalds, though it really isn’t.

The only light in the room is the neon glow of his phone. His eyes feel heavy even though he’s not the least bit tired. The cold morning air blows in through an open window and he gazes at the sky longingly, wondering why the sex aliens had left him here.

Today, he’s determined to find out about the aliens, and it’s going to start here.

Keith walks out of the classroom and into the locker hall. He makes his way to the basement, fishing a wire out of his pocket to pick the lock. It’s more art than skill as far as he’s concerned: he swears that each time he comes here the lock morphs, and it takes the right body slam along with the right twist of his wrist to get the ancient door to open.

Northwood High’s basement, also known as the Moth Pit. It’s the origin of Doomsday Declan, the town’s local legend. Some say Declan was a third grader who’d only been wandering the halls when he stumbled upon Pandora’s Box, hidden under a broomstick with a clown’s red nose and a pair of faux vampire teeth guarding it. Upon opening the box, Declan was promptly eaten alive by a horde of supersized moths, and in the form of a vampire clown, he’s been haunting the town’s bars and back alleys ever since.

The reality of the Moth Pit is just as creepy, although Keith has yet encountered any sign of the local legend. Down here it always smells the way mouths do after visiting the dentist. There are no crickets around even though the sound of them chirping never ceases. Filling the empty space are shelves with canisters of glowing radioactive material, containing the body parts of dissected frogs. Row upon row of them line are arranged and labelled with tape in another language (Russian?).   
  
Keith feels around the cobwebs and canisters, his fingers collecting dust and lizard shit. There's a shelf exclusively dedicated to frog eyes at the end of the room where they're stored in mini containers, almost looking like tadpoles or bubble tea pearls. Keith’s not even halfway through the first collection of blue canisters before moving on to the eyes. Something crawls onto his fingers and he pulls his hand out immediately. Three of the plastic containers come tumbling down, one of them smacking his foot.  He curses at both the shooting pain and the cricket that's spiraling up his arm, up his elbow to his neck. It slips under his shirt before he has a chance to react. Suddenly the cricket's running all around his back, aiming to dive into his ass crack. On instinct, Keith slams himself against the wall.

When the feeling of tiny legs crawling all around him have ceased, he gets up and looks around for signs of a dead cricket. Instead he notices, by the side of his sneaker, a rotten banana peel.  
  
He kneels down and reaches to pick it up. But he pauses, deciding instead that the case of the junkie sex aliens must be approached with utmost respect. The integrity of all evidence he unravels has to be preserved. With several mugs of coffee coursing through his veins, he dashes out of Moth Pit and back to his classroom. He curses when he sees a janitor coming around unlocking doors. He swerves behind a wall, heart thumping in his chest. He has approximately five minutes to evade the three janitors who must be going around with their key rings, climb out of the second story ledge to ledge, jump onto the awning of the outside sitting area of Mr Binge's Bakery and bound over the back gates into his truck to make his getaway- preferably without letting any of the staff catch sight of him.

A smirk curls on his lips because this, this is what he lives for. It’ll be a piece of cake.

Except there's chatter echoing in the halls now, and Keith peeks around a corner to see a man accompanying the principal. He's wearing a garishly brick red flannel earthed by squares of black all collared up, paired with velvet corduroy and, at odds with the Young Money look: boots. Not the quality kind but the kind you get in Goodwill when you lose your shoes on a trip, step up to the counter and ask for the first pair available at that instant. He's made a valiant effort at tucking what Keith assumes to be ragtag laces. Next to the gushing principal he looks like he might be a founder of the school, or a potential one if the exuberance in Mrs. Honerva's voice is any indication.  
  
"It's our honor to have you here," she preens.  
  
"No no, it's certainly my pleasure to be here. Thank you for welcoming me. I look forward to all Northwood High has to offer."  
  
He has a curious accent that Keith can't pinpoint. There's the tinkling of keys as Mrs. Honerva disappears into her office. Keith can't make out which direction Young Money is going so he holds his breath, contemplating whether he should make a run for it before he gets seen, face-first in pajamas by this guy who looks really filthy rich.  
  
But then Young Money starts chatting with the janitor, and Keith is sure he won't leave anytime soon. The last thing Keith wants to do is to be seen like this by Lotor, self-proclaimed jock-slash-nerd who smells like Playboy fragrances and is always geared with the latest iPhone model, rose gold, to capture proof of every scandal in school. Finding Keith in nude pink shorts would be a spectacular way to turn Keith from the vanishing loner to the biggest school joke for years to come.

Which means there’s only one way Keith is going to get out of this. He scrounges in his pocket for his cell phone and calls Pidge. She picks up on the third ring.

“What is it? I’m busy working on-“

Keith ends the call. He opens up his messenger.

**Keith: Need you here stat. I’m standing outside the Moth Pit in a baggy old shirt and pink shorts.**

The reply comes after a moment’s pause.

**Pidge: The shit I do for you.**

Keith wants to laugh but reckons there’ll be a better time and place for it. He ducks into the bathroom to wait for Pidge’s call which comes fifteen minutes later, when he can hear the clamor of early risers fiddling with the books in their lockers, slapping confessions or threats on post-it notes. There’s a knock on the bathroom door and Keith ducks down to see palm tree slippers. Something drapes over his head and covers his vision: a plain T-shirt and pants, probably Matt’s. Matt’s a tad shorter and slighter in build so it’s a bit of a tough fit around his shoulders and hips, but anything’s better than going around the way he is.

“Look, I even brought you toothpaste.”

Keith smiles. “You’re the best.”

Pidge is all dressed for school: the sweater from yesterday and clean, knee-length khakis. Between the two of them Pidge is the real insomniac, the one who doesn’t need cheap coffee to keep herself buzzing. As he squeezes a liberal amount of toothpaste onto the brush, Keith is already starting to feel the allure of sleep accompanied by a dull thudding in his head. “So what were you doing here?”

Keith explains how he got in this whole situation, except it sounds more and more like fiction as he goes on. He remembers the banana peel and almost swallows the minty froth in his mouth.

"We have to go back to the Moth Pit."

Pidge raises an eyebrow at him. She gestures to the mirror in front of him and he takes a cursory glance at himself. Keith spits the residual froth out of his mouth and hands the brush and toothpaste back to Pidge.

“It gets uglier every time I look.”

“Imagine how life is for me. I see that at least five times a week. When you’re around, that is.” Keith doesn’t appreciate her adding that last part. He can deny it all he wants but he’s still human and guilty for all the shit he puts Pidge through on a daily basis.

 “Alright, cool, but we can both agree that at least we don’t have to deal with Lance’s mud face. Right?”

Pidge grunts. “Whatever.”

“So about the Moth Pit—“

“It can wait. Class starts in less than five minutes.” Just as Pidge announces its imminence, the school bell rings. She glances at her wristwatch. “Or you know, now. Let’s go.”

“I don’t want to,” Keith mumbles, but he follows behind her anyway.

They stride across the hallways to class, maintaining a good pace such that they make it before their homeroom teacher. As the last of the students trickle in, Ms. Allura arrives along with someone new.

New to everyone except Keith.

“Young Money…” Keith murmurs, his eyes widening at the sight of the man’s straight-backed walk and friendly smile. Pidge, seated next to him, raises an eyebrow upon hearing the sobriquet.

“Good morning, class.” Ms. Allura stands next to Young Money at the center of the room, her hands folded in front of her. “This is our new transfer student, Shirogane Takashi.”

The class chatters collectively. Keith can barely believe it; Young Money, a student? Closer now, Keith notices his face a little better this time. A rustic undercut with bangs shelter a portion of his forehead. When he looks down like this, it almost makes him seem shy. And maybe he is, but Keith isn’t falling for it: his jaw game could fell a giant.

“I’m a student from Yokogawa High, Japan. As part of an exchange program, I’ll be attending Northwood for the next two months,” he bows, and it would be funny if he weren’t so charismatic. As it stands, no one’s laughing; there’s only impressed gossip and a few of the girls swooning. “Pleased to meet you all. I hope we can be good friends.”

Shirogane Takashi takes a seat in the same row as Keith, but at the very front next to the teacher’s desk. Ms. Allura smiles at him and then digs into a file in her bag. Keith watches as the students in the front start making small talk with Shiro. He catches snippets of conversation:

_“Hey, if you’re Japanese how’s your English so good?”_

_“Ah, thank you. Yokogawa High is an international school and my aunt is British. I don’t think I pronounce things very well though.”_

There are _ohs_ and _ahs_. Keith rolls his eyes. _I don’t think I pronounce things very well though—_ his ass. There’s no way he doesn’t know that he’s got every word nailed to the T. And judging from the fact that he’s enrolled in an international school, Keith’s instincts were spot on: he _is_ wealthy. Keith glances at his boots and finds himself puzzled once again by their incongruence.

“All right everyone,” Ms. Allura claps her hands to get their attention. There’s almost a glint in her eyes as she pulls out a stack of papers from her bag. The class moans as one, a couple students slumping back on their seats. She focuses her gaze on Keith, intent on letting him know that his return to class after so long has not gone unnoticed.

“Really?”

“First period?”

But Ms. Allura is already handing the sheets out. She stops at Shiro, “You can skip it for now.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll do it with the rest of the class.”

That million dollar smile again. Keith’s grinding his teeth and it pisses him off even more that he can’t figure out why Shiro’s existence bugs him so much. Shiro takes his pencil-box out and sits there with the sheet of paper face down, waiting for the others to get theirs before starting. When Allura makes it to Keith, there’s a moment of tension in the air between them. If there’s one teacher Keith has never been able to stare down, it’d be this physics teacher.

But instead of reprimanding Keith on his absence, she hands him the paper and says softly, “I know you can do this.” Which is almost as bad as the former scenario. Getting false hopes on a failure is never a good thing. Ms. Allura seems to make it her job to do just that.

Keith doesn’t even try though. When class begins, he just stares blankly at the questions and answer spaces: define laws of so and so, calculate the angular velocity of some amusement park ride, list down the parabolic pathway followed by the arrow. It’s not like any of this stuff will actually come to use: Keith would be better off with an actual bow and arrow in hand than a sheet of paper and his almost battery-flat calculator.

“It’s too many questions,” one of Keith’s classmates groans. She makes a show of visibly flipping through the eight pages Allura had prepared for them.

“Just do your best,” Allura says. “We’ll finish in twenty minutes.”

Keith winds up drawing a banana peel next to an oblong shaped head and two stick figures pushing a shopping cart spilling with tissue paper. He does address a couple questions, the really basic stuff that he doesn’t have to hunt through his jungle of a mind to answer. But it’s not enough to pass. He just about attempts that amusement park question when his calculator battery dies for good and he spends the rest of the time staring out the window.

“Time’s up. Everyone, please put your pens down.”

Allura goes around collecting the pop quizzes. She glances at the work of a few students, most notably the weaker ones, but she doesn’t look at Keith’s. Allura pauses when she flips through Shiro’s work. She blinks a few times.

“Unbelievable.”

Keith watches in inquisitive silence as Allura walks around her desk and marks Shiro’s paper. She practically breezes through it, ticking all the MCQ questions in the first section. There’s only one question she pauses at briefly, her eyebrows furrowing and unfurrowing.

“One wrong.”

Her voice resonates throughout the classroom. Then there are bursts of shock and exclamation for this transfer student.

“This is amazing, Shiro. But I was told you were at our grade level?”

“I think I am,” Shiro says, rubbing the back of his neck ever so charmingly. He flicks his bangs aside and Keith wants to break his pencil into half. “If it’s not too much to ask, may I know where my mistake is?”

“Of course not,” Allura says, leaning over the table to show him the one cross on his perfect pop quiz. “Here, it’s only because you substituted the wrong _g_ that…”

By the end of the class, Keith is sick of this Shiro guy already. He wants nothing more than to be as far away from him as possible, so once the bell rings he darts out into the hallway, arms sullenly crossed. It’s by unfortunate circumstance that after rummaging through his dusty locker, he sees Shiro walking towards him—rather, to his locker right next to him.

“Hey there. We’re in Ms. Allura’s class, right? I don’t think we’ve been acquainted.”

“We haven’t,” Keith mumbles, shoving his chemistry book under his arm. He doesn’t even bother to make up an excuse to leave. But a strong hand lands on his shoulder as he walks away.

“I’m sorry, have I offended you?”

There’s such a genuine show of remorse and concern on his face. Keith turns back and stares unwittingly at the transfer student’s biceps, his corded arms tight under the folds of plaid. He yanks his arm away.

“No. Absolutely not.”

Keith doesn’t give him another second. He stomps off, his knuckles whitening as he grips his textbooks like he’s trying to strangle them. Never in his life has he been this pissed at someone he hasn't known for more than an hour— not even with Lance.

This has got to be a world record or something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still looking for betas/ editors! <3  
> Tumblr: warmwintersun
> 
> I hope you enjoy this fic and thank you so much for reading! :)

**Author's Note:**

> The name of the fic is obviously credited to one of the biggest Sheith fics of all time, "Alien Sex Fiend"!
> 
> I am also very much in need of betas/editors for the upcoming chapters. Please contact me if you'd like to help out! <3 here or @warmwintersun on tumblr


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